My activity is admittedly extremely nerdy in a very particular way. When I was a kid (and still to this day), my father has been obsessed with tabletop baseball games. For those of you who are uninitiated (which I imagine is most of you because this is such a niche form of nerdiness), tabletop baseball is basically Dungeons and Dragons for baseball fans. I’m talking dice rolling, cards, stats, scorekeeping, strategy… the whole kit and caboodle.
My dad literally has entire storage units filled with various seasons and various brands of tabletop baseball games. It has actually become a sort of harmless obsession and has taken up much of the storage space in his home, but that’s a story for a different day. The most popular games are APBA and Strat-a-matic. As a kid, my father taught me how to play APBA, and since then, I have been a tabletop baseball gamer all my own. I still remember playing APBA with my father in a hotel room on our way to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Albany. One of my few positive childhood memories of my father. Not that he was abusive or anything, but he was very detached for much of my youthful years. He worked nights and was also very unhappy with his marriage, which made him withdraw, but again… a story for another day.
Anyway, this is all a preface just to admit that my latest fun activity was playing the PC version of one of those tabletop games, called Replay Baseball. Yes, the computerized version of a nerdy-ass card-based baseball game. I feel no shame for this.
I’m currently doing a replay of the entire 1998 season, deep into the steroid era and the year of the home run race between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire. I’m only about 10 games in for each of the teams, but man, I find serenity in the stats. I’m a little frustrated because recently, the game has been freezing on me at very inconvenient times, at one point even deleting almost an entire game. These are the trials and tribulations of a tabletop / PC baseball sim gamer.
Leave a Reply